Our Journal: First World War Studies

This article examines the experience of a Polish civilian in the British internment camp in Ahmednagar, India, during the First World War. Henryk Jewasiński, who was one of the thirty Poles detained there among the Germans and Austrians, left a unique testimony of his ordeal. His vivid descriptions and detailed observations of the day-to-day camp activities, as well as critical remarks on the imperial ideology, shed new light on the Polish First World War discourse dominated by the country’s struggle for post-war independence which predominantly focused on the European theatre. The analysis draws on the importance of race in the stated period and on the treatment of the internees in the colonies. I argue that although Jewasiński sympathises with the oppressed Indian nation, his views are not free from a Eurocentric bias.

Key Words: Internment, World War I, personal narrative, Ahmednagar, the other

During and after the First World War, the burial of the British dead was undertaken by the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Commission established the now-familiar military cemeteries and helped shape the forms of war commemoration and mourning, but as the Commission formulated and implemented its plans in the immediate postwar period, the public responded in various ways to design proposals. Newspapers covered the Commission plans and readers responded, through letters to the editor, political campaigns, and more. This paper explores reader responses in The Times to the IWGC cemetery designs, especially those related to headstone uniformity, for what they reveal not just about mourning the dead but about understandings of British democracy and wartime citizenship.

Key Words: World War I, nationalism, cemeteries, print culture, class, citizenship

Early in the war, anti-Belgian ideas were already occupying a central place among the German public’s images of the enemy. These were created within a very short time frame and drew upon stories of the alleged bestial expulsions of German nationals by Belgian citizens, supposedly organized by the state authorities and the purportedly cruel warfare conducted by Belgian civilians against German troops. At the same time, the question of Belgian neutrality arose and the German concession that this had been breached out of self-defence was rescinded. Thus emerged discursive images of Belgians and Belgium which depicted new character traits of its western neighbour’s population and which ultimately formed the basis for the entire wartime discussion of potential German control of the country. Based on a broad corpus of sources, this article examines the rhetoric and dynamics of the ‘annexation debates’ in Germany’s public sphere, while focusing on the underlying concepts of order in Belgium and also portrays the critical voices in these debates.

Key Words: Nationalism, stereotypes, annexionism, German public, Belgium